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(From the Preface)
Over the past 400–600 years a
culture and society, originating for the most part in Europe and dedicated to the idea of
trade as the ultimate source of well-being, began to expand to all parts of the globe. In
many ways it is the most successful culture and society the world has ever seen, its
technology, wealth, and power monuments to its success; but accompanying its expansion
have been problems—growing social and economic inequality, environmental destruction,
mass starvation, and social unrest. Most members of this society and culture perceive
these problems as distant from themselves or as challenges for them to meet. However,
there is the possibility that these problems, which threaten to negate everything this
culture has accomplished, are intrinsic to the culture itself. That is the possibility
explored in this book.
The outline of this book
emerged when, a few years ago, my colleagues at the State University of New York at
Plattsburgh, James Armstrong and Mark Cohen, and I began developing a
course on global problems. We wanted to create a course that would help students
understand the major global issues that they confront in the mass media, problems such as
the so-called population explosion, famine and hunger, global environmental destruction,
the emergence and spread of new diseases, so-called ethnic conflict and genocides, and
terrorism and social protest. We learned quickly that to make the course successful, we
had to overcome the often ethnocentric perspectives of the students, perspectives that
were often reinforced by media coverage of global affairs. We needed also to compensate
for the students’ lack of background in anthropology, history and economics, all
crucial for understanding the roots of the problems we were to examine. Finally, we needed
to illustrate that the problems we examined were relevant to them; that the problems would
affect them either directly or indirectly, and that their actions now or in the future
would determine the extent to which the origins of these problems could be acknowledged,
let alone ever addressed. The form of this book emerged from our efforts at dealing with
these pedagogical issues and the classroom interactions that these efforts stimulated.
This Website is designed to describe the book, and to provide access to Internet resources, exercises, and discussion questions for readers,
students, and instructors. There are links to sites arranged by topics covered in the book, links to country information, to information on corporations, links to global
media, along with links to map sites. There are also
thesis questions to encourage discussion of topics
discussed in the book, and exercises associated with the descriptions of Websites.
You can also examine the Table of Contents and read the
introductions to each of the chapters.
There is, in addition, a Global Updates page that contains information on important
global developments that relate to topics addressed in the book. Finally, we have
added a collection of Online readings, The Online Global Problems Reader,
to complement the book and provide students, instructors, and general readers with
additional perspectives on global problems.
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